


Things Not Seen

by rageprufrock



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:42:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hebrews 11:1</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Not Seen

_Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen._

 _(Hebrews 11:1)_

 

 *******  
**

John meets her on the Santa Monica pier, staring out at the vast blue of the ocean and eating a Sno Cone, her lips purple-blue. He says to her, “Is that grape? That’s my favorite flavor, too,” because he’s an idiot and she’s pretty.

When she turns around her eyes are huge and dazzlingly green, startled, her mouth open.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she finally says, like she’s been trying to remember the words, and John isn’t smooth enough to hide the wrench in his chest at that, a sting that must make its way across his face—judging from her suddenly-red cheeks and embarrassed expression.

“Oh,” he says stupidly. “Sorry.” He jerks his thumb out behind himself. He’s probably pointing at the Sno Cone vendor. “I’ll just—”

“No!” she interrupts, and she gives him a studious look, the one Jenny Marten had worn before she’d condescended to go to prom with him, and says, “Stay. It’s okay. I’ve already broken the rule anyway.”

John raises an eyebrow. “There’s only one rule?”

She laughs, and John thinks it sounds like bells and an invitation, the wide-open spread of welcoming arms. “There’re a lot of rules, but they boil down to one.”

He puts his hand on the back of his neck. “Are—I mean, you sure?”

She grins and pats the warped, graying wood of the pier, an empty spot next to her. When John sits down he’s near enough to feel the warmth of her skin through the pale linen summer dress flapping around her knees.

“I’m sure,” she promises, and says, extending her free hand, “My name is Eve.”

John takes it and gives her his best smile. “John,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

 

 *****

Eve has lush, curling dark hair, skin like porcelain, soft and generous curves and a hand that fits perfectly inside of John’s. She eats two more Sno Cones (in cherry and lemon) and helps John build a sandcastle that they watch disappear into the surf as the sun goes down, melting red and orange and purple in the distance.

She says, “I’ve had a wonderful time today—I’m glad I met you, John,” and John tells her, “We should do this again.”

When she looks doubtful, worried, John can’t help but add desperately: “You already said you broke the rule—you should break it again.”

She does.

The first time they kiss—three days later, in the drowsy dusk—she curls her hand along the back of his neck and murmurs into his mouth until John opens his lips, lets her in. Eve is hungry and sweet and yearning in a way that John has never known, and he can’t help but let her touch his hands, his arms, the flat of his chest and trace his dogtags underneath his t-shirt, to kiss the corners of his mouth and the lids of his eyes because it all seems so new and wonderful to her.

She says, “I’m sorry,” flushed, admits, “I’ve never been kissed before.”

John blinks three times, strokes his fingers through her hair, cradling the warm curve of her skull and lets his thumb trace the soft skin behind her ear. “Well,” he says, hoarse and soft and too-honest, he knows he’s showing all his cards, “you should be kissed as often as you like, but—” and he leans in so he can say it against her lips “—only by me.”

“Oh,” she breathes out, “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

 

 *****

Eve says she’s 19, but doesn’t sound sure, which makes John think she’s too young for him. And although he figures this is probably wrong and ethically questionable, he can’t seem to tear himself away, to ask the hard questions—he’s on leave and the beach is wide and endless, and Eve is beautiful in the golden light at the end of a day.

When he tells her he’s a pilot with the Air Force, she asks him questions about physics and flying and clouds for hours and John tells her, after explaining how it feels to ride nine Gs of force that if she doesn’t stop being completely amazing he’s going to fall helplessly in love with her.

She blinks at him—still green and green and green, like the color of oceans off the coasts of the last fingers of the Japanese archipelago—and asks, “What’s that like?”

John stares at her. “Pulling the nine Gs?” he says, confused. He may have explained badly.

Eve frowns. “Being in love,” she asks, matter-of-fact, and at his expression, she looks away, and sounding embarrassed, she says, “Never mind—it’s a stupid question.”

“No,” John says softly, touching her cheek, and when she turns to look at him, eyes bright beneath dark lashes, “no—it’s not that. It’s just. I don’t think I can answer that question for you.”

“You’ve never been in love?” she murmurs, pressing her face into his neck.

It’s getting cold and the breeze off of the curling waves is icy, so John wraps his arm around her, palm smoothing away goosebumps on her shoulder.

“I’m pretty sure love is something two people do together,” he says, shy.

 

 *****

Eve doesn’t seem to have a phone number or a house or anything, just wanders up to him on the beach. John is pitifully grateful for her, for every time she slips a hand into his as they walk up and down the sand. Their fourth date, after they’ve mastered kissing, he takes her to a little restaurant in town so they can work on grossing out everybody else in the dining room. It goes off without a hitch, and on their way out Harry and Norton see them and hoot and holler and act like asses until Eve laughs and says, “How can one drink hurt?”

Which is how they end up in the bar, Eve sampling all of their drinks and deciding in the end she likes the lemon drops the best around the same time John decides she’s very drunk.

“Okay, this is awkward,” John says, Eve half-collapsed against him.

“My head,” Eve says emphatically, dreamily, “is spinning. In two different directions.”

“Yes,” John answers, trying not to laugh, “a bar filled with Air Force officers trying to please a pretty girl by buying her frou-frou drinks will do that to a person.”

“You think I’m pretty,” Eve sighs, blissful, and stares up at him with a guilelessly happy expression, so sweet John has to look away. This is ridiculous, too fast.

“I think you’re beautiful,” he says bashfully, honestly, and takes her hand, tugging her up and leading her toward his car. “Come on—let me give you a ride home.”

“I don’t think you can drive there,” Eve says doubtfully, stumbling along after him.

John grins. “I only had two beers. We both can’t be lushes.”

“I mean, I don’t think I could give you directions,” Eve slurs. She blinks heavily as John stuffs her in the passenger seat, and by the time John is buckling her seatbelt, she takes the opportunity to kiss him on the neck and say, “Can’t we go to your place?”

 

 *****

“Your friends,” Eve moans, tugging at his shirt, “they asked if we’d slept together yet.”

“I’ll kill them,” John promises, and strokes his hands down the curve of her back, up her warm, soft thighs. He thumbs her nipples through the fabric of her dress and can’t stop kissing her, moaning into the red of her mouth, sucking bruises into her neck, the sweet skin of her collarbone.

“Later,” she complains, and slides her hands up his shirt, nails scratching at his chest.

It takes a Herculean effort for John not to pick her up, slam her against the wall of his tiny apartment and shove at her, wrap her legs around his waist and grind into the hot, wet of her. But in between telling her to “Wait, wait, hold up” and begging, “Oh my God, you have to stop that” and “Jesus, at least wait until I get us to the bed” he remembers that girls who’ve never been kissed before probably have never been fucked before either, and it seems to slow the whole thing down, like looking at time through a drop of water: distorted, ethereal.

And when he presses her into the white, cool sheets of his bed, when he pulls the dress from her shoulders after fumbling at a row of pearl buttons, he does it gently. And when she says, “What are you…?” he ignores her questions—for the first time, maybe the only time—and pushes her thighs up, thumbs hard against the soft skin on the inside of her knees, and licks his way inside her.

By the time he creeps up her body, comes face to face with her, kisses her again so she can taste herself on his mouth, Eve’s eyes are blurry and her mouth is swollen, skin wet with a fine sheen of sweat. “I think,” she says, breathy and voice hitching as he slides a finger, then two, into her, listening to the slick sounds of skin on skin between them, “this is maybe what love feels like.”

And John can only say, “Yeah, yeah,” when she throws a leg over his hip and groans, “Now,” he finally slides into her; one long, languid stroke.

 

 *****

The weekend melts away in the yellow bars of sun across his bed, Eve’s mouth mapping the span of his shoulders, the angle of his hip, her lips trailing down his stomach, up his thighs. And when they’re both tired and sore and sleepy, she pillows her head on his lap and John reads to her,  _War and Peace_ , in low, soft tones, fingers stroking through her hair.

 

 *****

John wakes up Monday morning to the soft sound of Eve’s voice in the next room; she sounds tired, sad, and by the time he pads out to his living room she’s curled up on the floor, next to the window. The phone is on the hook.

“You okay?” he asks gently, sitting down beside her.

She leans into him, hands looping around his neck. “I will be,” she says. He kisses her temple, pulls her into his lap, can’t help but rock her back and forth. He’s wondered—but only a little—where and who she belongs to, if she doesn’t have a mother and father he should visit, holding his hat in his hands and awkward, blushing. If he doesn’t have anybody to call and ask permission. But Eve seems so alone, and so assured in her solitude he always felt stupid wanting to ask. He doesn’t think she’d appreciate it.

“What can I do?” he murmurs.

“Are you sure you love me?” she says. She sounds scared, but not young, voice outstripping her age, and John just holds her tighter as he says:

“I do. I’m sure.”

He is. He means it. He hopes she understands.

“Then it’s okay,” she answers after a long beat, like she’s reassuring herself. “Then everything will be all right.”

 

 *****

She disappears the next morning, leaving a note on the kitchen table. It says:

 _Dear John—I have a few things to tend to, but I’ll be back. Yours, Eve._

He spends the next three days glued to his telephone, sulking terribly and driving his friends insane. Harry and Norton get him riotously drunk, but decide eventually that when afflicted with love and the possibility of abandonment, not even whiskey can heal all wounds—although it inflicted plenty of new ones in the form of a hangover so hellish John can barely move in his bed without wanting to throw up.

So he’s not surprised when he starts hallucinating, when he opens his bleary, swollen eyes and sees the ball of light in his bedroom, sees it resolve into Eve.

“Oh my God,” John moans into his pillow. “I’m never drinking again.”

“That’s not really the reception I was hoping for,” Eve says, amused.

John falls off the bed and has just enough time to say, “You’re back,” before he has to go to the bathroom and puke up all of his internal organs.

 

 *****

The wedding’s a disaster—the sort of thing that’s obviously been planned by a dozen too-enthusiastic soldiers and one infatuated groom: too many airmen and no bridesmaids to be seen, although wives emerge from the woodwork to volunteer their aid. Eve takes to the attention like a fish in new-but-acceptable water, and observes the pre-wedding shenanigans with a mild look. In the end, she wears her own white linen dress and a flower behind her ear, and when they kiss “I do,” the courthouse melts away in a cacophony of cheers.

It’s all John hears for days:  _I do I do I do._

 

 *****

John is aware that he is rapidly becoming one of those men who develops a reputation for being hopelessly soft with his wife, but he can’t help it. He keeps coming home—to Eve! To their house! To his house with Eve!—and seeing her find some other ordinary facet of life amazing. She grows roses with the clinical precision of a professional, but spends hours in the dirt with them, smelling the buds, astonished and babbling about the colors, eyes fever-bright. The same with food, with wine, with the shape of clouds and the color of the sky. She knows the why behind everything—even though all of it seems new to her, all of it seems like a surprise.

“Man,” John laughs one evening, watching Eve gaze at the mad flit of fireflies trapped in a jam jar, “where do you  _come_ from?”

“Very, very far away,” Eve laughs.

It’s later, after a year and three moves and three bland houses on three Air Force bases, that Eve attacks him at the front door, eyes wild in panic and says, “I’m pregnant.”

John looks worriedly at her hands, fisting his uniform shirt.

She’s actually three months pregnant; he remembers how he’d picked her up, spun her around the room, shouted himself hoarse and then curled around her in their bed. He touched her stomach and her hair and her face and felt so loved and amazed and blessed his throat had closed up, and he’d slept with his face pressed against her left breast, listening to her heart.

“That’s a good thing,” he reminds her. “Babies are good.”

She gives him her best and most effective crazy face. “There is a baby inside me.”

He starts to pry her fingers off of him. “It’s not permanent,” he soothes. “They come out.” Which is apparently exactly the wrong thing to say because her eyes get somehow wider, and the rest of the evening is lost trying to coax his wife out of catatonic shock, poking at her sympathetically and bringing her pickles.

“We should paint the room,” John muses later, interrupting his own reading of  _Little House on the Prairie._  It’s her favorite book and he’s read it to her a dozen times now. “I wonder if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“It’s a boy,” she mumbles from her repose on the couch. “And he’s just like you.”

John gives her a look. “How do you know?”

She snorts. “Trust me, we’ll just chalk this one up to maternal instinct.”

Six months later, John has to agree. It is a boy and it is just like him—down to the wild brush of dark hair and stubborn temperament. It takes John William Sheppard about twelve seconds to decide he likes his mother best, and John can’t fault his son for that—he likes Eve best, too.

“I made a baby,” Eve says, staring and amazed, finger stroking over John’s cheek.

“I helped,” John whispers back, perched on the edge of the hospital bed.

“Shut up,” Eve mutters, recounting John’s fingers and toes. “I did all the hard work.”

John shrugs. “I guess that’s true.”

But Eve is right: their son takes after his father, with a reckless sweetness to him that makes John seize up his boy, spin him in the bright expanse of the sky as he shrieks in delight. Their son’s first word is ‘fly,’ and when he says it Eve gives John a glare so intensely poisonous John figures he can forget giving the kid any little brothers or sisters. He’s let off the hook after John’s second words turn out to be ‘momma’ and ‘bright.’

“He definitely looks like you,” Eve murmurs, years later, in the deep black of night in Texas. John thinks about Santa Monica and Sno Cones, and how one day they’ll go back—all three of them, a family—and he’ll tell John how he met his mother, how she’d dropped into his life like a perfect accident, a puzzle piece.

“I don’t know,” John disagrees. “Everything else, he takes after you.”

Eve laughs, and presses in closer to John’s chest, fingers closing around his dogtags.

“Maybe,” she murmurs, half-asleep, “but no one will ever know.”

 

 **  
*****   
**

 

 **Epilogue**

John’s father met his mother on the Santa Monica pier, eating a Sno Cone with her mouth purple-blue. His first words to her were, “Is that grape? That’s my favorite flavor, too,” because he was an idiot and John’s mom was pretty.

She had dazzling green eyes and told him she wasn’t supposed to talk to him, but Rodney doesn’t blame her for breaking her own rules—Rodney does it near constantly when it comes to her son.

He knows how intoxicatingly easy it is to look into Sheppard’s green eyes and say “yes.”

It’s how Rodney ends up in El Paso, Texas on what feels like the hottest day of the year, helping John empty out his grandmother’s house before it goes on the market. Rodney made a spirited attempt en route from Colorado down to argue that if John’s second cousins have been living in it all this time, it’s their responsibility to clean the damn thing. But John had given Rodney a look Rodney bets John’s mother saw that day on the pier, and so Rodney’s dusting off hatboxes filled with photographs, pawing greedily through all the letters and pictures, pieces of John’s childhood.

Later that night, damp from a shower and sprawled out over the bed in their hotel suite, Rodney asks, “Who did you take after? Your mom or dad?”

John shrugs, drowsy. “My dad always said I was like her in every way that mattered.”

“I guess,” Rodney murmurs, drowsy. “The ATA gene is matrilineal.”

It’s nearly two months later before Rodney has enough time to settle in with his filched photographs, spread them across the blanket on John’s bed and study them without interruption. And he stares at them for hours, running his hands over yellowing pictures of John as a boy, shrieking with laughter, his face somber as his mother read to him, a hand in his dark hair.

And later, after Rodney decides which photograph is his favorite, he slips into a frame he brought back from Earth, and regards it through the glass.

“Hello, Eve,” Rodney says quietly, feeling silly, setting it down on the nightstand. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to Zoetrope, who not only made the gorgeous graphic at the end (a thousand apologies for my mutiliation in the corner -- I think you know what I'm talking about, but I did the years and was like,  _crap_ , feel free to find me in a dark corner somewhere and pound me to a bloody pulp) but pulled beta duty on this when I was just beginning to enter the "dangerously crazy" stage of this project. You're a rockstar. — Pru (1/30/2007)


End file.
